[HN Gopher] Rapid global heating is hurting farm productivity, s...
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Rapid global heating is hurting farm productivity, study finds
Author : guerrilla
Score : 127 points
Date : 2021-04-02 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| The key is water management, that's why large mono-cultures are
| so bad, they're deserts without all the artificially added water
| and fertilizers. When you have a diversified environment,
| permacultures, you keep all the material for life
|
| I know you'll think yes but how do I feed 7 billions people with
| small permacultures, I think we can, because for the same area a
| permaculture is really more productive, we'd need more people
| working in agriculture, and I think that's fine too, in this
| crisis context, people should consider job changes
|
| Btw as a French man, I'm so disappointed by how agriculture is
| shaped in our country
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_en_France#Producti...
| I'd love to see many more orchards, bigger productions of figs,
| persimmons, clementines, peaches, tomatoes, etc.. Fruits are so
| marvellous for our organism. What destroyed our agriculture
| landscape is Marshall plan and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| I'm not familiar enough with the science, but wouldn't global
| warming open up new farmland in the north? Land that is currently
| not used as farmland, so it wouldn't factor into any
| calculations.
| ldbooth wrote:
| It will also make a wider band of hospitable climate for
| insects and tropical diseases. "Got my pills 'gainst mosquito
| death"
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Malaria used to be common throughout the US.
|
| "Although malaria was eradicated from the United States in
| the early 1950s, it had once been a prevalent disease,
| especially prior to the 1880s. Through-out the nineteenth
| century, malaria affected most populated regions in the
| United States, significantly undermining the health of the
| population and the U.S. economy. Above all, malaria was one
| of the country's leading causes of death. According to the
| U.S. Census Bureau, 45.7 out of every 1,000 deaths resulted
| from malarial fevers in 1850." --
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2600412/
|
| It was (and is) controlled by draining swamps and getting rid
| of standing water, the use of insecticides and window
| screens. If malaria can be controlled today in Florida, I
| think most of the rest of the country doesn't need to worry
| about mosquito death pills for quite a while.
| nullserver wrote:
| I take those pills for an autoimmune disease. Not much fun.
|
| Mosquito angle isn't one I've heard before.
| ldbooth wrote:
| The greenhouse effect is most noticeable in the coldest parts
| of the greenhouse, like putting a lid on food in the
| microwave to spread the warming effect. The most impacted
| places will be furthest from the equator, which is why
| glacial melt is so prominent already. It's the canary in the
| coal mine. Once all that ice is lost, the climate patterns we
| know and can predict may and likely will change and be
| irriversible. There may be some local good effects, like
| farming in VA, but extreme heat/cold storms or tropical
| pestilence may negate any farm yield. Climate science is way
| more interconnected than we can wrap our heads around. The
| second third and 100th order derivates are unpredictable.
| Diederich wrote:
| Global warming is a technically accurate phrase to describe
| what we're dealing with, but I prefer 'climate change' because
| it captures the other, perhaps more important impacts beyond
| increasing average temperature.
|
| Warmth is energy, and injecting energy into a large, chaotic
| system, like our planet's climate, certainly causes the average
| temperature to increase, but it also causes the system to
| become more chaotic.
|
| More concretely, climate change also means more frequent hot
| spells, more frequent cold spells, more frequent flooding
| events, more frequent droughts, more frequent storms, etc.
|
| Along with certain average temperature ranges, crops need many
| months of stable weather in order to usefully produce. Even
| though, on average, the temperatures in more areas will move
| into the range needed by various crops, the average amount of
| necessary weather stability will also decrease, in the
| potential new growing areas as well as the old.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/global_weirding
| castis wrote:
| I can corroborate this, living in Virginia for the last 20
| years. We used to get a lot of snow when I was younger, and
| now we get a lot more days where the heat/humidity is almost
| unbearable, and a lot more storms that result in less snow,
| and more ice. Charlotte county recently had about 80% of
| their electrical infrastructure taken down by an ice storm.
| Not fun.
|
| Ive attempted to explain the weather as a pendulum, the highs
| get higher and the lows get lower as the system attempts to
| find equilibrium while having energy added from outside an
| otherwise closed system.
| Diederich wrote:
| Yup, that sort of thing is happening all over the planet.
|
| Things get really confusing when, one winter in the future,
| your location ends up getting a record high snowfall total.
| On average, you're getting less, but the extremes on both
| sides also get more extreme. The winter I described very
| well might be sandwiched between winters where you received
| no frozen precipitation at all.
| nullserver wrote:
| An Old joke.
|
| US scientists were explaining global warming to Russians in
| Siberia.
|
| The Russians became very excited and asked what they could do
| to help speed up global warming.
| lanstin wrote:
| Now they are having think about having to evacuate some towns
| due to the permafrost melting making the surface unstable. ht
| tps://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/f0280-w...
| jeffbee wrote:
| It increases the frost-free season but it doesn't make the sun
| actually shine more, and it is light, not heat, which grows
| plants. On the margin, there will be a growing season in places
| where there is not, and there may be places that get one extra
| crop where today there is one per year, but there aren't going
| to be olive groves in the Yukon.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| But during the summer there's actually quite much more
| sunlight in the north than closer to the equator. The growing
| season might be shorter, but it has potential to be very
| productive.
| mempko wrote:
| Unfortunately, the northern lands don't have good top soil for
| growing crops. Top soil takes a LONG time to develop. We would
| need to ship a lot of soil north for us to use the land. Or we
| need to grow without soil.
| trynumber9 wrote:
| Some northern lands are known for their rich, dark soil. The
| northern states and southern Canada, for example.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem
| mempko wrote:
| You are right that there is some good soil in northern
| areas. I guess the general question is, is the soil health
| at more northern latitudes healthy enough to replace the
| loss of growing in the lower latitudes.
| trynumber9 wrote:
| For the top of lower 48, sun angle is literally the same
| as southern France... Really we're not that far north.
| g8oz wrote:
| Parts of Russia too.
|
| "How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis"
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/16/magazine/rus
| s...
| trynumber9 wrote:
| The northern US receives a lot of sunlight (similar to
| southern, mediterranean France) but has been less profitable in
| growing certain crops due to its shorter growing season and
| frost risk.
|
| But these are changing:
|
| https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
|
| https://www.globalchange.gov/browse/indicators/frost-free-se...
|
| logically one would expect agricultural output to increase in
| these areas as their solar potential is unlocked but there are
| other areas where the opposite will occur
| jellicle wrote:
| No. Crops need light, excellent soil, heat, and water. Warming
| the north provides heat but none of the other 3. Canada and
| northern Russia are lands of rocks and trees. You can't grow
| crops on rocks, at least not in the way that commercial
| agriculture is used to.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| No.
|
| Crop yields are up (30-90%) for every single type of crop in the
| United States in the past 30 years.
|
| https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyl...
|
| https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyl...
|
| https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/wwyld....
| dv_dt wrote:
| Drought alone cost $10-14B in 2019 and are increasing due to
| climate change.
|
| https://www.resources.org/archives/economic-impacts-drought-...
|
| Similar with flooding, and increasing pestilence due to warmer
| winters.
|
| As the saying goes, past events is no guarantee of future
| performance.
| ben_w wrote:
| Only $10-14 billion?
|
| According to this list, worldwide agricultural output is $2-8
| _trillion_ (nominal vs. PPP) so I'd have expected way more
| drought induced losses even as just seasonal noise: https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_secto...
| dv_dt wrote:
| I was unclear on the scope of those numbers, they were for
| US ag, so your number is comparing US drought numbers to
| the entire world output. Comparing an apple to the entire
| apple orchard.
|
| If we wait to take steps until it's an even larger problem
| then we lock in decades of yield being curtailed by weather
| extremes.
|
| In your linked data, 2017 US Ag contribution to GDP is
| $175B, so almost 10% reduction of the entire nations
| agricultural output from just drought is significant, and
| expected to rise.
| oddeyed wrote:
| The article seems pretty clear that the story is about how
| productivity is worse _than it would have been_ without the
| global heating that industrialisation has incurred.
| SilasX wrote:
| So then, the costs of fossil fuel emissions -- _evaluated
| purely in terms of these results_ -- are less than their
| benefit? (That is, fossil fuel usage increased agricultural
| productivity, while warming decreased it by a smaller
| amount.)
|
| Obviously, you wouldn't want to dismiss the concerns of GW on
| that basis, but this doesn't seem like a good reason to think
| GW is a problem, even as there are other good reasons.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| So this article's clickbait headline should read instead
| "While crop yields are up, they could be even higher..."?
|
| Let's set aside the dishonest scaremongering headline.
|
| No one can disprove a study that describes a fictional
| alternate reality based entirely on supposition of simulated
| outcomes.
|
| Productivity is higher than it has ever been in human history
| and the trend line is up and to the right and the Guardian
| wants you to be terrified.
| cochne wrote:
| I think the headline is fair. Would you have the same
| reaction to an article claiming smoking cigarettes hurts
| life expectancy? I don't think the argument that "life
| expectancy is up 30% since cigarettes were invented!" would
| be a good rebuttal against the headline.
| deathgripsfan wrote:
| This is a false comparison because you can run
| longitudinal studies with smoking populations and compare
| them to control populations. Let me know when we can run
| experiments on climate change with multiple Earths and
| compare them to control Earths.
| jellicle wrote:
| Of course we can? And do? It's trivial to run a
| greenhouse at different temperatures and see how the
| plants grow. Trivial to adjust light, rainfall, mineral
| balance, pH, etc. Kids do this in 8th grade science
| fairs.
|
| Honestly HN. Here's an idea: when you encounter some
| topic area you don't know anything about, just consider
| for at least two seconds the possibility that there may
| be smart people working in that field, since before you
| were born. THEN start talking about it. Or don't. Maybe
| you don't have anything useful to add.
| lanstin wrote:
| Isn't biology as simple as Unix? Just read the man pages
| and the source for the binaries for a a few weeks and I
| can grok it. How could plants be more complicated than
| software? I can make stuff happen in software. Plants
| just sit there.
| frenchy wrote:
| That's true, but we do have populations that are closer
| to control. There's still quite a few people who engage
| in subsistence farming in less industrialized nations.
|
| For example, the rice farmers in the northern Philippines
| (excluding Banaue which is heavily touristed). They've
| certainly benefited in the last century from medicine, a
| stable government that prevents their historical tribal
| warfare, and cheaper manufactured goods, but their actual
| farming hasn't changed a whole lot.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| However, I am sure a large part of the increase in
| productivity is due to fossil fuels. For example a tractor
| versus a horse is much better in farming, and electric
| tractors are much more expensive than diesel powered
| tractors.
|
| Thus even their hypothetical would be better scenario doesn't
| make much sense.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that (in the USA) cheap (read:
| subsidised) corn led to cheap sweeteners (i.e., high fructose
| corn syrup). That made more foods sweeter and sweet ones
| cheaper. Increase of such consumption contributes to the
| obesity rate.
|
| The point is, inexpensive raw food "materials" can have a
| downside. Maybe less corn isn't as bad as it sounds?
| reedjosh wrote:
| I wish corn/wheat weren't subsidized.
|
| Half of a typical supermarket is filled with artificially
| cheap grain based product. The `stick to the perimeter`
| mantra about how to buy healthy food is directly related to
| the fact that grain based products tend toward the middle of
| most stores.
| jfengel wrote:
| Unfortunately, that advice no longer helps you avoid
| artificially cheap grain based products. The meat counter,
| nearly always on the perimeter, is full of grain-fed meat.
| And the frozen aisle, former composed largely of frozen
| versions of the produce section, is now dominated by
| prepared foods that are fairly calorie-dense and nutrient-
| poor -- and made from those same grain-based products.
|
| There are good choices to make in both those sections. (Or
| at least, better choices.) And better than the shelf-stable
| products that are even more calorie-dense (because water
| makes things spoil) in the middle aisles. But it's become a
| lot more complicated than it used to be.
| adreamingsoul wrote:
| Why is crop yield an indicator of productivity? Does any
| research exist that correlates yield with productivity?
| gumby wrote:
| Productivity is output divided by input.
|
| So in farming it can be yield divided by labor (labor
| productivity), yield divided by soil addenda (e.g.
| fertilizer), yield in dollars divided by all costs of
| production, etc.
|
| Sometimes factor productivity will have a specific name. For
| example capital efficiency is the productivity of capital
| (output divided by cap ex) which, due to the very nature of
| capex, is usually used to find a _change_ due to investment.
| The productivity of energy use, typically measured on a whole
| economy basis, is called "energy intensity" (gdp /GW) though
| some industries are called "energy intensive"
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Crop yield is how much food you harvest per unit of land.
| It's the definition of productivity for farming. The amount
| of arable soil is the chief constraint on production.
| realreality wrote:
| > The research measured productivity by inputs - such as
| labor, fertilizer and equipment - and the output in food
| they produce
|
| When you highlight "yield", you're only counting the
| outputs, not all of the inputs that this study apparently
| models.
| antattack wrote:
| On one hand, rising carbon levels in the atmosphere make plants
| grow faster, on the other, changing weather patterns, drought,
| frost, cause crop damage.
| ben_w wrote:
| Also on the minus side: human cognition is impaired by higher
| CO2 levels.
|
| https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/continued-CO2-emissions-
| wil...
| nix23 wrote:
| >On one hand, rising carbon levels in the atmosphere make
| plants grow faster
|
| Just some plants grow faster.
|
| https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-higher-
| car...
| atoav wrote:
| I can't recall but I read a study once which had a look at
| how nutritients are affected by CO2 induced faster growth.
| The conclusion was pretty much that stuff grows faster but
| has less nutritients. (The study looked at rice I think)
| OrbitRock wrote:
| There's also a phenomenon that hotter conditions cause
| water to evaporate faster.
|
| The term here is vapor pressure deficit (VPD).
|
| VPD is the relationship between the amount of water in the
| atmosphere, temperature, and the rate of evaporation.
|
| As temperature increases, rate of evaporation increases not
| linearly but exponentially.
|
| VPD has been established as a major control on plant
| growth.
|
| And there's research showing that increasing VPD has
| already offset the gains we've seen from CO2 fertilization
| on plant growth:
|
| https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396
| tryonenow wrote:
| When you're looking at something complex on the scale of the
| earth, it's easy to cherry pick data, even accidentally (we
| call that bias), to paint whatever picture you want. Right now
| there's immense institutional pressure against any research
| that is critical of climate change, so it's hard for me to
| trust anything in that field. There are indications that
| increased CO2 concentration is a huge boon to crop growth.
| nix23 wrote:
| Well it's kind of easy, if the downsides overweight the
| upsides your on a slippery slope earth-wise:
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-
| experts-d...
| minikites wrote:
| >there's immense institutional pressure against any research
| that is critical of climate change
|
| There's also immense institutional pressure against
| "research" showing the Earth is the center of the solar
| system or "research" that evolution isn't real. It's not a
| conspiracy if the pressure is fighting falsehoods.
| OrbitRock wrote:
| Unless rising vapor pressure deficit undoes your gains from
| CO2 fertilization:
|
| https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396
| carlisle_ wrote:
| From the study:
|
| >We develop a robust econometric model of weather effects on
| global agricultural
|
| I don't think the US counts as global agriculture. Certainly a
| subset though.
| _rpd wrote:
| From the article ...
|
| > ACC has reduced global agricultural TFP by about 21% since
| 1961, a slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last 7 years
| of productivity growth. The effect is substantially more severe
| (a reduction of ~26-34%) in warmer regions such as Africa and
| Latin America and the Caribbean.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01000-1
| titzer wrote:
| Tomatoes taste like shit in America, hands down.
| todd8 wrote:
| Modern store bought tomatoes have been bred for size and
| firmness. Firmness in particular reduces losses during
| mechanical harvesting and shipping. Since 1968, the date of
| wide-spread use of mechanical harvesters, this has resulted
| in varieties that are not as flavorful. It is probably this
| mechanization of tomato farming and not global warming that
| has made flavorful tomatoes harder to obtain.
|
| From [1]:
|
| > Within five years [from 1963], 99.9 percent of the industry
| was using the mechanical harvesters, and most farmers were
| planting the comparatively tasteless hybrid tomatoes built to
| withstand them.
|
| [1] https://civileats.com/2015/07/15/from-ketchup-to-
| california-...
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| Most food in America is designed for transport durability and
| yield. So if you go for the nicer canned tomatoes which
| doesn't rely on the tomato itself for durability, they're
| quite good. On the same level as the imported DOP stuff.
|
| Of course you're probably referring to fresh tomatoes. And by
| in large I agree but I would like to point out that
| California has some pretty darn tasty tomatoes. Sure you
| might have to go out of your way or pay a little extra to get
| them but they exist.
| deathgripsfan wrote:
| Absolutely. Garden tomatoes taste amazing and can be eaten on
| their own with just a bit of salt.
| bdefore wrote:
| Right? They're night and day different in France. What
| exactly causes this? General store American ones often may
| as well be thin red latex bags of water.
| redisman wrote:
| Your generic supermarket tomato these days is optimized
| for long shelf life and not flavor or nutrition.
| titzer wrote:
| They are picked before they are ripe and they are
| artificially ripened, like bananas. They are cultivated
| for fast growth and maximum size, and not given time to
| mature.
|
| If you grow your own tomatoes, the results can be
| amazing.
|
| 30 years ago, my grandmother grew the most amazing
| tomatoes in her vegetable garden on the farm. When she
| died my uncles sold off the farm and a developer split it
| into 5 or 6 plots that are now mostly horse pastures with
| huge McMansions on them. So it goes.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| A lot of us don't like the taste of raw tomatoes. As far
| as I'm concerned, the closer they are to latex bags of
| water, the better. I only use them (generally sliced on
| sandwiches) to bolster my "eating vegetables" status to
| satisfy social pressures. I'm satisfied, whether I'm
| getting actual vitamins or not.
|
| I'm American. Possibly there are a lot of people like me
| here, so the stores are actually providing what the
| people want.
| minikites wrote:
| I can't imagine the mental gymnastics required to deny
| anthopogenic climate change at this point. The data is abundant
| and reliable, we can see the effects with our own eyes (how many
| "once in a century" weather events have we been having in the
| past decade?) and the evidence against anthopogenic climate
| change comes from organizations that benefit from denying it.
| randomopining wrote:
| I think a large chunk are people that know it's true, but think
| that humans can "out-build it" or "out-engineer it"... reality
| is that nobody understands how much our natural environment
| still impacts us.
|
| You sit on your chair in a city, working on your dual 4k
| screens, getting a fresh burrito delivered in 20 mins, and it
| seems like humans can only get more advanced. But few think
| about the fragile supply chains that allowed all that to
| happen.
| minikites wrote:
| >But few think about the fragile supply chains that allowed
| all that to happen.
|
| I think this is an excellent point. One can draw a clear
| parallel to the Bronze Age Collapse and there's no reason we
| couldn't have a modern version today. We've eliminated all of
| the "slack" in our global systems and organizations in the
| endless pursuit for profits above all and our systems are now
| not resilient enough to handle a major problem. Imagine what
| will happen when our changing climate puts even more of a
| strain on our systems, both economic (e.g. the subject of the
| article) and political. Xenophobic nations are not going to
| get more tolerant when global conditions get worse.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > I think a large chunk are people that know it's true, but
| think that humans can "out-build it" or "out-engineer it"
|
| Yeah, but a lot of those people held the "climate denial"
| view like 1 decade ago. This is just the natural evolution of
| the view as it becomes more and more undeniable.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| It's partly learned helplessness: mass media likes making
| claims "act urgently, next year it will be too late" [1].
|
| And now the "next year" is here. It is too late. Done. Just
| relax and live (the rest of) your life to the fullest.
|
| [1] https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-act-
| now-2650039989.h...
| hammock wrote:
| From the linked study:
|
| >The first thing we needed to understand was how temperature and
| precipitation influenced crop productivity in many locations. To
| do this, we analyzed data from up to 20,000 counties and
| districts around the world to see how crop yields varied in each
| place with changes in precipitation and temperature. Once we had
| constructed an empirical model connecting crop yield to weather
| variations at each location, we could use it to assess how much
| yields had changed from what we would have expected to see if
| average weather patterns had not changed. The difference between
| what we would have predicted, based on the counterfactual
| weather, and what actually occurred reflects the influence of
| climate change.
|
| The researchers are throwing every deviation from "average" into
| "climate change" - including cooling, heating, more precip and
| less precip. Headline of OP would thus seem to be inaccurate.
| Also, hard to say with just this info how much of the farm
| productivity effects are driven by manmade carbon emissions.
| dv_dt wrote:
| The huge problem is if we wait even longer for clearer, higher
| magnitude data to act, the delay in fixing the problem will
| lock in the problem for many many years.
| salmonfamine wrote:
| Climate research moves from papers to articles to headlines like
| a game of telephone. I think this is a big problem because it
| gives your average doomscroller a sense of impending dread and
| helplessness. Michael E Mann (the famous climate scientist who
| published the "hockey stick" emissions paper) talks about this in
| his new book -- "The New Climate War." Check it out.
|
| The body of this article does touch on the actual claim of the
| paper -- that a myriad of factors linked to climate change have
| stymied agricultural productivity (particularly in less-affluent
| countries) compared to what that productivity would have been
| without those factors -- even though total agricultural output
| has grown due to better technology and so on.
|
| However, if all you see is the headline the impression you get
| is: the world is getting hot and our farms aren't being
| productive enough. That's a different claim that inspires
| despair, not action.
|
| Climate change is real and very, very scary. But the progress
| we've made in renewables, battery tech, agricultural yields,
| desalinization, etc., is really remarkable. It ain't over 'til
| it's over.
| salmonfamine wrote:
| If you're feeling compelled to act, now is a great time to look
| for jobs in CleanTech.
|
| https://www.angellist.com/blog/inside-the-venture-climate-te...
| core-questions wrote:
| Pity that most of this is still fuelled by oil, in one way or
| another; shoving that oil energy through several
| intermediaries does not actually decrease entropy.
|
| It's like the use of oil to make fertilizer to grow corn to
| make ethanol to supplement gasoline; would have been better
| to just burn the oil to start with, economically,
| environmentally, and in the long term politically, too. Corn
| subsidies in America wrecked the Mexican corn production
| market, resulting in waves of illegal immigration as poor
| farmers who don't know how to do anything else moved north to
| continue to ply their trade in a place where it is still
| profitable.
|
| Too many cleantech projects are catabolic: consuming more
| energy than they produce, while spreading the blame and
| consumption around and giving people a way to claim carbon
| credits. Might as well just call them 'carbon indulgences'
| for all of the emissions they actually save in reality.
|
| Only an economist could pretend that someone who owns a bunch
| of land doing nothing has an invisible commodity of carbon
| the government allocated for them to emit, that can be sold
| to a factory somewhere else that is actually emitting carbon,
| and pretend that it is somehow helping the environment to
| shuffle those dollars around.
|
| Somehow, production processes continue; with the exception of
| those that shut down, only to open elsewhere in the world
| where there are fewer regulations on environment and labour.
| The result is a lose-lose, where we no longer have the
| ability to actually decrease emissions, no longer have any of
| the economic advantages of the emissions, and of course no
| longer have any way to ensure the people working in those
| facilities get a living wage or any of the other benefits of
| the labour laws our ancestors fought for.
|
| Go ahead and take a CleanTech job, just remember, there's a
| 95% chance it's a circlejerk that doesn't accomplish anything
| at all in the real world besides spreading the problem around
| and grifting off of it in the process.
| Diederich wrote:
| For the record, I've been what could accurately be called a
| climate change alarmist for over three decades now. More
| concretely, I've felt that there was a least a fair chance that
| climate change would, by the year 2070, cause enormous harm to
| human civilization, where 'harm' could be seen, in part, as
| over a billion premature deaths. Over the decades, my internal
| estimate of the odds has changed from "a small but
| statistically significant chance" to "more than 50%" today.
|
| I've also been of the mind that, most likely, there's little
| chance that humanity will be able to substantially change these
| probabilities.
|
| Yes, that's pretty doomy gloomy, on the surface at least.
|
| "But the progress ... etc., is really remarkable. It ain't over
| 'til it's over."
|
| This! We CAN NOT know what the future holds. A primary 'doomer
| movement' in the 1970s when I was growing up was population.
| Even among the most forward thinking, optimistic people of the
| time, few if any could imagine our planet being able to feed 8
| billion people. None could imagine the possibility that the
| world population could naturally (without either huge die offs
| and/or draconian controls) stabilize at 10 billion people,
| which many solid models are now indicating. (And I get that
| there are valid arguments against the sustainability of our
| current and near future food production methods.)
|
| The point is that we can not know what miracles technology and
| sociological progress can bring, and we're expanding in both
| areas exponentially. (I'm not using that word, exponentially,
| lightly or incorrectly.)
|
| Is all of this 'hopium'? Perhaps. I agree with those that argue
| acceptance is important and healthy. Yes, accept that, from
| what we can see right now, things look very bad. Yes, accept
| that there's a _strong_ probability that human civilization
| will collapse in the lifetime of Millennials. At the very
| minimum, all of the steps /hours/days between now and then will
| be interesting, and there's an unlimited amount of joy to be
| found and created.
| lanstin wrote:
| Hope vs despair is often within our power to chose and it is
| a political choice. Choose despair and you make bad outcomes
| more likely as it is a contagious feeling. Choose hope and
| you make good outcomes more likely, and make the process of
| fighting for the good outcomes more effective and more fun
| for all.
|
| It is the social form of the prisoners dilemma: choose your
| response assuming there is nothing special about being you in
| particular, and assume that you are choosing form any. Do you
| want to live in a group where everyone does A or everyone
| does B. This also leads to more flexible choices: I'd like to
| live in a world where most people pick up trash a few percent
| of the time. Where most people lobby for carbon tax and
| electric cars and whatever the solution for cement and steel
| are.
| salmonfamine wrote:
| How would climate change bring about the collapse of human
| civilization?
| GVIrish wrote:
| _Widespread crop failures due to extreme conditions during
| growing seasons and collapse of pollinator populations_
| Collapse of fisheries globally due to ocean-acidification.
| Some 1 billion people currently rely on seafood as primary
| protein _Frequent extreme weather events cause frequent
| large scale property destruction_ Higher sea level +
| extreme weather ravages coastal cities, which will also
| disrupt global supply chains *Heatwaves will push into
| lethal territory in parts of the world
|
| All of these things put together will put severe strains on
| unstable parts of the world first, but if the trends are
| not abated and we end up in 'Hothouse Earth' territory,
| modern civilization will not be sustainable.
|
| The worst stuff comes when we're talking 3, 4, 5 degrees C
| of average warming. But the tricky thing is that we don't
| have a full understanding of all the planetary feedback
| loops and tipping points.
| salmonfamine wrote:
| > All of these things put together will put severe
| strains on unstable parts of the world first, but if the
| trends are not abated and we end up in 'Hothouse Earth'
| territory, modern civilization will not be sustainable.
|
| I hear this a lot from people online. But how realistic
| is this really? Say we enter 4 degrees of warming. I
| assume that we will experience food losses in both
| agriculture and fishing. The expectation seems to be that
| we will make no adjustments to our supply chains, no
| adaptations, no restrictions on food waste (currently
| over 50% in the developed world) or any other attempt to
| mitigate these factors.
|
| Heatwaves/wet bulb stuff is worrying, and so are
| hurricanes. I don't want to diminish the problem. But it
| seems that this argument really rests on an understanding
| that we don't understand feedback loops, and that they
| are much worse than we anticipate, and that they lock us
| in to a Hothouse Earth scenario that pushes us into much
| higher levels of warming that we anticipate, and etc.
|
| Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But I haven't seen any
| evidence for it, despite how often people parrot it from
| other Reddit comments or whatever.
| GVIrish wrote:
| > I hear this a lot from people online. But how realistic
| is this really? Say we enter 4 degrees of warming. I
| assume that we will experience food losses in both
| agriculture and fishing. The expectation seems to be that
| we will make no adjustments to our supply chains, no
| adaptations, no restrictions on food waste (currently
| over 50% in the developed world) or any other attempt to
| mitigate these factors.
|
| It's hard to put in context the scale of the problem, but
| you have to understand that certain forces of nature are
| far beyond our ability to adapt to in a way that avoids
| widescale misery and death.
|
| The plants and animals alive today have evolved over many
| millions of years to live in a climate that operates in a
| certain range, on a certain schedule (seasons). Shifting
| climate across the planet by 4 degrees C means millions
| of species will be put into a climate they are not
| adapted for, and along with other pressures of pollution,
| and habitat loss, these species will go extinct.
|
| As far as fisheries go, higher seat temperatures will
| cause hypoxic zones with mass fish die-offs and at a
| certain level of acidity, phytoplankton can't form their
| shells and that whole food chain collapses. It also means
| coral not only will die off, but it will _dissolve_ the
| reefs.
|
| For terrestrial crops, we have some ability to engineer
| crops that are more drought resistant and can stand some
| level of heat waves. Not only that, but the pollinators
| that many crops depend on will be severely impacted. When
| droughts wild fires, floods, sudden cold snaps, and the
| like are frequent and severe, it is very unlikely human
| kind will be able to sustain agricultural yields in a way
| that won't result in famines, particularly in the
| developing world.
|
| There are already parts of the world that are unstable
| and have difficulty supplying resources to their
| populaces. Add these stressors and it is all but certain
| that basic order will break down in those parts of the
| world on a scale that is hard to fathom.
| Diederich wrote:
| I'll violate my decision to not get into the weeds on
| this material briefly by offering this very quick
| summary: whatever all the details are, what's undeniable
| is the rate at which extraordinary weather events are
| happening around the world: the rate is increasing, and
| the rate of increase is increasing.
| core-questions wrote:
| > For the record, I've been what could accurately be called a
| climate change alarmist for over three decades now.
|
| It must be tiring, eh? I imagine it's a microcosm of the
| experience of a Jehovah's Witness; you continually have some
| new threshold of irreparable doom, which you keep having to
| punt off 5-10 years, even though your sense of certainty that
| everything is doomed is never alleviated.
|
| Somehow too, despite no significant warming or sea level rise
| over that time, you've moved up your level of expectation
| that we are doomed - you're doubling down on the hypothesis,
| huffing doom headlines like gasoline out of a bag. Can't be
| good for your mental health or your long term legacy
| planning.
|
| > A primary 'doomer movement' in the 1970s when I was growing
| up was population. Even among the most forward thinking,
| optimistic people of the time, few if any could imagine our
| planet being able to feed 8 billion people.
|
| Turns out that this was a double edged sword; massive amounts
| of propaganda in response to the population problem resulted
| in responsible people in the West using birth control and
| having fewer children, while the irresponsible here and the
| backward elsewhere continued their existing breeding strategy
| unabated. The result, of course, is that Africa is going to
| have several billion people by 2100 depending on the
| projection you prefer, without doing anything to increase its
| own capacity to feed its people without charity from the
| West. As our own birth rates plummet, we're forced to resort
| to mass immmigration to shore up the labour force, resulting
| in turn in the watering down and decay of our culture and any
| institutions that are fundamentally Western in nature.
|
| Not sure that worked out the way anyone wanted, really.
|
| > Yes, accept that there's a strong probability that human
| civilization will collapse in the lifetime of Millennials.
|
| I honestly see no reason to believe this is true. If it does
| happen, it's not going to be because of climate change -
| that's still a long ways out on any reasonable projection.
| No, it's going to be because of classic civilizational decay,
| not unlike what happened to Rome, as we debase our currency,
| sacrifice our values, allow our cities to fall to organized
| crime and violence, and watch our institutions crumble under
| the force of 'woke' people who have never created any value
| in their short, pointless lives.
| weakfish wrote:
| > and watch our institutions crumble under the force of
| 'woke' people who have never created any value in their
| short, pointless lives
|
| Well, this is incredibly inflammatory. Imagine trying to
| engage with this. HN is becoming more and more hostile each
| day...
| Diederich wrote:
| > It must be tiring, eh?
|
| For me, not at all. I have fully embraced full acceptance.
|
| > ... despite no significant warming or sea level rise over
| that time ...
|
| To be clear, I'm personally not really interested in a
| debate on these points, one way or another. Others can
| engage in these questions, hopefully in good faith.
|
| > ... hypothesis ...
|
| Correct!
|
| My _intuition_ is that the probability of collapse is 90+%.
| My brain is typical and typically human /biological: the
| bad and scary will always carry more weight than anything
| else.
|
| Because of the many unknowns and because technology and
| society are improving exponentially, a more objective, less
| intuitive and less emotionally driven estimate is much
| lower, so I'm going with roughly 50% at the moment.
|
| I mentioned full acceptance previously. A critical portion
| of that is fully accepting my own lack of objectivity, my
| own lack of rationality, my own lack of knowledge and
| understanding.
|
| It's something I've shared with my wife and son several
| times: one of the most excellent and amazing things that
| could happen to me is, when my son is my age and I'm on my
| death bed, be able to honestly make fun of my 2021 self,
| the man who really thought there was a chance that
| civilization might collapse. Why? Because civilization has
| flourished and has overcome these challenges.
|
| That is my _preferred_ outcome.
|
| > ... 'woke' people who have never created any value ...
|
| In your eyes, am I one of those 'woke' people, who never
| created any value?
| core-questions wrote:
| > That is my preferred outcome
|
| Mine as well, friend. I simply choose to live in a way
| where I believe this is also the likely outcome. You can
| pretend that this is an overdose of 'hopium' if you like,
| but I prefer to simply call this honest optimism.
|
| > In your eyes, am I one of those 'woke' people, who
| never created any value?
|
| I don't know you, but if you spread climate doom all over
| the place, you may be cancelling out the value you've
| created in more material ways. The morale of a nation
| matters.
|
| Put it this way: I have literally met people who say they
| do not want to have children because they fear for the
| climate future. There are even articles in publications
| like the Guardian, Time, etc. that advocate for people to
| lower their carbon footprint this way. Meanwhile, in
| other nations where nobody cares about climate, the birth
| rate dwarfs our own; what does that mean for the future?
|
| National morale is at an all-time low and this is in no
| small part due to people being sold a story at every
| angle that they have no future, no reason to hope, no
| salvation. Just consume, live in the pod and eat bugs,
| and hang on to watch the lights go out. Do you think that
| creates or preserves value?
| DangitBobby wrote:
| > I don't know you, but if you spread climate doom all
| over the place, you may be cancelling out the value
| you've created in more material ways. The morale of a
| nation matters.
|
| On its face, to me, this is utter bullshit. Either people
| are completely blind to the reality and they think
| there's nothing to do or they actually are thoroughly
| convinced of reality and _still_ do nothing because they
| are demoralized? How do you win? We need to convince
| people it 's actually a problem but then coddle and hand-
| hold them so they don't realize it's an existential
| threat... And if it's not an existential threat they
| won't respond. Damn, we might as well give up now!
| Diederich wrote:
| > ... you may be cancelling out the value you've created
| in more material ways ...
|
| When considering whether to engage in this kind of
| conversation, what you've said here is my deepest
| concern.
|
| For a long time, many years, I felt that sharing my
| thoughts and opinions on these matters honestly would
| cause more harm than good. So I didn't, which was fine
| with me. Less time consumed, less stress, etc.
|
| Over the past year, though, overall awareness of the
| potential for climate change driven collapse of
| civilization has greatly expanded. It's now in the common
| discourse. That has led me to engage in these
| conversations.
|
| My goal is to help people accept the strong _possibility_
| of collapse, and also embrace the _reality_ of
| uncertainty. Acknowledge that things look bad;
| acknowledge that the odds are against us. Each person can
| then figures out how to draw strength and resolve from
| both of those.
|
| > ... I prefer to simply call this honest optimism.
|
| Your belief lays quite nicely in my personal
| _uncertainty_ about the future. I think you 're wrong
| about the balance of probabilities, but I hope you're
| right and I'm wrong!
|
| > ... do not want to have children ...
|
| Before my wife and I had our son in the early 2000s, we
| decided that we were going to have at most one biological
| child, and adopt one or more others if it made sense.
|
| > Meanwhile, in other nations where nobody cares about
| climate, the birth rate dwarfs our own; what does that
| mean for the future?
|
| A future where there are a lot more of 'them' than 'us'?
| Fine with me. Is that fine with you?
|
| As I noted elsewhere, it looks likely that the total
| population will top out at around 10 billion, about 20%
| higher than now.
|
| > ... being sold a story at every angle that they have no
| future, no reason to hope, no salvation.
|
| That's bad for national morale, and I agree with you that
| national morale is extremely important.
|
| What's worse for morale is people seeing and experiencing
| what used to be 100 year, 500 year and 1000 year weather
| events, every year, while being told that those events
| aren't really a threat to our civilization.
|
| Morale is best preserved when people are aware of the
| truth, the facts, without hyperbole, and fully taught and
| trained in understanding of the science of statistical
| uncertainty.
|
| National morale in the United Kingdom during the blitz in
| 1941 was preserved not by saying that what was happening
| around them wasn't an existential threat. It was
| preserved by understanding and embracing the reality of
| that threat, and moving forward from there.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Rome was doomed for failure as soon as it transitioned to
| the Empire. Blaming it on some equivalent of "woke" people
| is ridiculous.
|
| If anything, Rome would have probably lasted longer if the
| Gracchi had been successful.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| How is it that immigrants and especially their kids are a
| fundamentally unassimilable mass who do nothing to protect
| or preserve said institutions? As the child of an immigrant
| mother I find this perturbing.
| core-questions wrote:
| > How is it that immigrants and especially their kids are
| a fundamentally unassimilable mass
|
| I didn't say this, but since you are perturbed, I shall
| address it for you, so that you can understand my own
| perturbation.
|
| First, I come from the perspective (as a non-American)
| that the culture of my country, as it existed over the
| last hundred years or so, has value. It is a culture
| which proved itself capable of taming a wild land, from
| pioneers to industrialists to a post-industrial
| technological civilization. This was a mighty undertaking
| which cost many lives, all of which were spent in the
| name of a better future for their descendants. I am the
| inheritor of such a legacy, having descended from people
| that made their way West in the 1600s. I have the
| "privilege" of being the descendant of countless
| generations of farmers, most of whom did not own their
| land, going back to time immemorial.
|
| Second, I come from the perspective of someone who is
| married to a child of immigrants, from a vastly different
| culture. This gives me a broadened base of understanding,
| I think, having visited her ancestral homeland several
| times and seeing the rapid pace of change there as
| Western ideas and methodologies are picked up, adapted,
| and even improved upon there. I am not against
| immigration, I am not against other cultures, and I am
| not against change in my own nation - within limits.
|
| I would like to introduce the concept of "cultural
| carrying capacity": the rate at which new people can be
| introduced into a culture and be effectively absorbed by
| it. This absorption doesn't have to imply total
| assimilation; but it does imply the primacy of the host
| nation's original culture, in the form of its languages,
| its religions, its values, and its control over the great
| national project and destiny. This is not to say that
| such things should be unchanging, but rather to say that
| if I wish for the stability and continuance of my culture
| over time, preventing all of this from being
| deconstructed is a basic necessity.
|
| If a nation brings new people in at a rate below the
| maximum carrying capacity, it will do fine. This rate is
| slow enough that new immigrants are able to integrate;
| they're forced to learn the language, their new friends
| and coworkers are primary native, and their lifestyle
| adjusts to be virtually indistinguishable (in public)
| from the locals. They retain their traditions, language,
| ritual, religion, etc. within their family and maybe with
| some fellow immigrants, but by and large they're the same
| as anyone else. Their friends are a diverse group; their
| political concerns are based on policies and projections,
| not group affiliation; their goals and desires can be
| expanded to include the nation at large, not just their
| identity group. This is the ideal case.
|
| If you bring people in at a rate higher than the carrying
| capacity, this effect is diminished or stops altogether.
| People are able to find insular bubbles of their original
| population, they can continue to speak their first
| language, they don't need to adapt to the local area more
| than is required by law and interaction with
| institutions. They may form a political block, elect
| their own representatives, and force institutions to
| cater to their language and cultural needs.
|
| Is this to the detriment of the locals? It depends on too
| many variables to name. What is clear, however, is that
| if you bring your culture with you and set it up here,
| you will also most likely set up the problems with your
| culture, as well. The mitigations in place to prevent
| violence and crime in the local population which have
| evolved over decades or centuries may not apply or work.
| Disruption in business, in organized crime, in politics,
| and within the leadership of institutions becomes the
| name of the game, never actually decreasing as long as
| the influx of new cultures is constant.
|
| If we become a nation of people who hail from nations
| where corrupt politics are and have been the normal state
| of affairs for centuries, we should not be surprised when
| our own politics become corrupt. The same goes for
| whether fathers stay with their families, whether
| violence is used as a way to settle personal disputes,
| whether bribery is part of how law enforcement operates,
| and whether nepotism is the standard mode in business. We
| all know that there are many countries where all of the
| above are the normal state of affairs; we also all know
| that the West somehow threw off much of this, and was
| engaged in a cultural project of moving away from such
| venal operations, before the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration
| Act....
|
| One need only look at the countless examples of cities
| like Minneapolis, formerly a safe midwest city full of
| White people, now the violent home to the largest number
| of Somalians outside their home country. It happens
| slowly, and then all at once... each step of the way
| lubricated by everyone's unwillingness to say what
| everyone is secretly thinking. Somehow, along the way, it
| becomes more beneficial to find ways of hiding the truth
| by changing the statistical rubric than it is to actually
| confront the situation at hand.
|
| Now, consider that different cultures have different
| values around families and reproduction, as well.
| Immigrant families may have a far higher birth rate than
| the host population who have stabilized over time,
| particularly in the West where sex ed and birth control
| have been mainstays for 3 generations or more now.
|
| If you bring people in at a multiple of the rate of the
| carrying capacity, as has been suggested (Canada to 100
| million people by 2100 is a number serious people are
| suggesting, for example) the result will be the complete
| replacement of the host population with a conflagration
| of new cultures. Some people will do well in this vain,
| others will not. Some areas may be peaceful, some may be
| embroiled in total race war, or gang warfare between the
| fading vestiges of the native organized crime and
| newcomer gangs. The result is essentially unpredictable
| and unmanageable.
|
| I have no problem with immigration, friend, but I do want
| the culture that built my nation to continue to have a
| strong, permanent presence. I do not want the high-trust
| culture my ancestors sacrificed to build frittered away
| so that we can check a diversity box on some form; I do
| not want to be told my ancestors were evil, and watch
| their statues be torn down, and watch their legacy be
| wrecked by someone high on Marxist idealism that knows
| nothing of what it actually takes to build upward. Yet,
| those people are more protected by the institutions our
| ancestors built than I would be if I tried to counter-
| protest them.
|
| Alas, nobody in power feels this way, even though a
| massive section of the population does. Democracy has
| failed us, because it refuses to address this need. The
| result may be anger that spills over into violence, or it
| may be a slow and whimpering defeat. I think the latter
| looks more likely at this stage; the pathological
| altruism my people are famous for, a game-theoretical
| advantage in isolation, will be our undoing in the long
| run.
| lanstin wrote:
| Nothing is permanent, certainly not culture; and most
| ancient cultures are abhorrent by modern standards.
| Together, the world is creating a new culture with a
| chance to be better than what made it possible in the
| past. Onward and Upward, never ceasing to strive for the
| good!
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Look, I strongly favor fighting climate change. Any
| reasonable view of future lives having any moral worth makes
| it an imperative. But predictions like "accept that there's a
| strong probability that human civilization will collapse in
| the lifetime of Millennials" are alarmist and _not backed by
| the science_.
|
| There will be huge impacts on global productivity by the end
| of the century, but the very, very large impacts are not
| going to happen until everyone currently alive is dead and
| gone.
|
| This is what we need to confront - that the sacrifices that
| we need for climate change will mostly _not benefit us_ ,
| they will benefit the children of our children, and their
| children as well.
| astockwell wrote:
| I really appreciate your comments in this thread, Diederich.
| They have helped me distill my own similar feelings of
| uncertainty and uncertainty in my understanding of
| uncertainty. Thank you.
| Diederich wrote:
| Hey cool, glad I could help...though I'm not sure how. (:
| ldbooth wrote:
| Have you moved on to accepting what will happen? I'm coming
| to terms with it. I had a long conversation about the
| thermodynamics of the situation with an oceologist and it set
| me straight on what will happen.. all I recall was her
| emphasizing I just mix dyed blue ice water and dyed red warm
| water in an aquarium and voila, witness the turbulence. Scale
| that to oceans, and concede that thermal mass governs the
| global weather patterns high and low.
| Diederich wrote:
| > Have you moved on to accepting what will happen?
|
| Yup. For someone who became aware of the existential risks
| that human produced CO2 and CH4 are causing back in the
| 1980s, full acceptance is, in my case at least, literally
| the only long-term, sustainable approach.
|
| > ... the situation with an oceologist ...
|
| I think that's been happening with a lot of scientists
| these last couple of years. Many I've spoken to are
| basically, "I don't see a way forward, a way out of this."
| For many, it brings a sense of calm.
|
| In my mind, the next necessary step is to embrace and
| accept uncertainty. That one's very well informed view
| isn't necessarily correct. This is an ideal shield against
| despair, which must be avoided at all costs.
| curuinor wrote:
| there's also exponential stuff going the wrong way, too. all
| of cryptoland, for example. this stuff just works in logspace
| or logexpsum space
| Diederich wrote:
| > there's also exponential stuff going the wrong way, too
|
| That's quite true, and that 'bad exponential' stuff is the
| main source of my pessimism.
| salmonfamine wrote:
| The "bad exponential stuff" that the online doomers seem
| to cling to is almost always:
|
| 1) permafrost melt, albedo feedbacks, etc., which has
| been considered in the most recent IPCC reports and is
| still being researched
|
| 2) sudden mass extinction due to biodiversity loss
|
| As far as 1) goes, read the IPCC report and get back to
| me. 2) is scarier, for sure, but there is not enough
| research done to conclude that we have breached or are
| about to breach an extinction tipping point. Some recent
| models suggest phytoplankton extinction (the usual
| tipping point in doomer arguments) may be reversed in
| lower latitudes in a warming climate. But no one knows.
|
| "Many of those making facile comparisons between the
| current situation and past mass extinctions don't have a
| clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much
| less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the
| marine fossil record actually were," he wrote me in an
| email. "It is absolutely critical to recognize that I am
| NOT claiming that humans haven't done great damage to
| marine and terrestrial [ecosystems], nor that many
| extinctions have not occurred and more will certainly
| occur in the near future. But I do think that as
| scientists we have a responsibility to be accurate about
| such comparisons."
| https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-
| ends...
| Diederich wrote:
| > ... read the IPCC report and get back to me ...
|
| As I stated elsewhere, I'm not inclined to debate the
| particulars, but I will note that we've learned a LOT
| since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment
| _Report came out seven years ago. The sixth report, due
| to come out next year, which will still tend toward
| extremely conservative conclusions, is going to crush the
| findings in the previous report in terms of 'bad news'.
|
| As to the other particulars, I've been researching and
| reading about those and many other categories for
| literally decades now. That doesn't make me right, and it
| doesn't make you wrong, but it has led me to realize and
| embrace the simple truth that even unlimited, good faith
| energies applied to debate over the details has basically
| no impact on anybody's opinions.
|
| All that really matters is personal background and
| personal experiences. And your personal background
| (including, in large part, your DNA) and personal
| experiences are different from mine.
|
| Going forward, however, we will share awareness of more
| and more frequent 100 year/500 year/1000 year weather
| events, for example.
|
| I have no way of predicting how that will affect your
| view on things, and that's fine. Full and deep acceptance
| is a very useful tool.
|
| To cherry pick one item:
|
| > ... as scientists we have a responsibility to be
| accurate ...
|
| Amen and amen. It's easier than ever to represent real
| problems in a hyperbolic fashion, but we must not do
| that. First: because inflated threats and predictions
| will cause those among us who are slower to accept the
| realities ahead to entrench, and be even less likely to
| see what's really happening. Second and most importantly:
| our best chance to beat this is to, together, focus on
| being clear, understanding and calm.
| ldbooth wrote:
| Mass extinction of species, both flora and fauna.
| salmonfamine wrote:
| See my other comment.
| mempko wrote:
| It isn't over until it's over. However, COVID and the response
| governments around the world made it's clear they are NOT
| treating climate like an emergency.
|
| The issue with climate are feedback loops which cause non-
| linear responses. These are dangerous because they have a
| tendency to sneak up on you. We are being way too conservative
| in our climate response and the uncertainty around the future
| should not make us feel better.
|
| I believe Michael Mann is wrong that scary headlines prevent
| action. Look at Greta and the youth climate movement and XR. It
| exploded BECAUSE of the dread and anxiety. Yes, it's true
| people on the sidelines might get scared away, but you only
| need a small group of REALLY committed actors to make real
| change. Those on the sidelines will come along after the fact.
| salmonfamine wrote:
| > It isn't over until it's over. However, COVID and the
| response governments around the world made it's clear they
| are NOT treating climate like an emergency.
|
| How does the COVID response have anything to do with the
| climate response? The governments of the world have all
| responded differently -- some quite stringently -- and the
| speed with which we produced an mRNA vaccine (itself a
| technological marvel) is truly nuts.
|
| >The issue with climate are feedback loops which cause non-
| linear responses. These are dangerous because they have a
| tendency to sneak up on you. We are being way too
| conservative in our climate response and the uncertainty
| around the future should not make us feel better.
|
| It is true that feedback loops are dangerous, but what do you
| mean by "sneaking up" on us? There's always uncertainty in
| modeling and projections of any kind, but the most agreed-
| upon climate models and projected scenarios include feedback
| loops.
|
| > I believe Michael Mann is wrong that scary headlines
| prevent action. Look at Greta and the youth climate movement
| and XR. It exploded BECAUSE of the dread and anxiety. Yes,
| it's true people on the sidelines might get scared away, but
| you only need a small group of REALLY committed actors to
| make real change. Those on the sidelines will come along
| after the fact.
|
| Well, maybe. Everyone is different, so perhaps some people
| will be spurned to act by these sorts of headlines. A
| majority of people in the US agree that climate change is a
| problem that needs to be addressed, so hopefully we will see
| more and more political pressure in the future.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| The COVID response showed that governments (not all) can
| take drastic action when needed, both to limit the spread
| of the decease as well as to protect the economy. If they
| treated the climate emergency as the crisis it is, they
| would have acted as forcibly, or even stronger, to reduce
| green house gas emissions. They are not even close.
|
| There are no technical or economical hurdles that stops us
| from strongly mitigate the climate change. It is pure
| politics. And it make me so angry.
| core-questions wrote:
| > The COVID response showed that governments (not all)
| can take drastic action when needed,
|
| If this is our rubric and measure of good governance, why
| don't we all just become fascists already? At least in
| that case we could pretend to be unified and proud of
| what we're doing, instead of this chaotic, bungled,
| arbitrary response that takes hints from authoritarianism
| without getting any of its benefits.
|
| > There are no technical or economical hurdles that stops
| us from strongly mitigate the climate change.
|
| This statement is absurd. Do you have some magic wand
| that is going to solve the car problem, or the
| international shipment problem? Have you got some secret
| battery technology that you aren't letting on about,
| perhaps one that doesn't require extremely expensive rare
| materials to produce?
|
| Remember, as you drive your Tesla around, that nigh-
| indentured Chinese workers essentially engaged in mining
| actions arguably worse than classic colonialism in Africa
| are responsible for providing you with your "clean"
| vehicle, which will probably never make up for the
| emissions created in its production....
| jcims wrote:
| >There are no technical or economical hurdles that stops
| us from strongly mitigate the climate change.
|
| I think if actually work through a solution in just about
| any industry you'll find that it's actually fairly
| complex, both in terms of technical implementation and
| economic adaptation.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > both in terms of technical implementation and economic
| adaptation.
|
| Can you elaborate with an example? Most industry has
| managed to completely transition from coal -> natgas in
| the last decade and a half so I find it hard to believe
| that the transition is just so complex it isn't possible.
|
| If we price carbon at what it actually costs, seems like
| they'd figure out how to transition again.
| jcims wrote:
| I didn't say, nor do I believe, that it's impossible. I
| even agree with your approach, pricing the externalities
| into the cost. A few challenges that come to mind:
|
| a) We don't have a good way to normalize offset pricing,
| there's a nascent market but there is tremendous
| variability in pricing.
|
| b) It's also not clear how much the offset market can
| scale on existing approaches and technologies. We can
| only plant so many trees, and we aren't in a position to
| run most heavy transport or ag off of current
| electrification technologies. Eventually we're going to
| need new technologies to reduce dependencies on petroleum
| and find alternatives or develop carbon capture
| technologies for processes that are difficult to reduce
| any further.
|
| c) Economically, nothing happens in a vacuum. When one
| company our country or industry begins pricing in these
| externalities, they are placing themselves at a
| competitive disadvantage. Tariffs and regulation will
| likely need to be introduced to moderate the inevitable
| shift in trade and the increased prices will cascade to
| the consumer.
|
| Ultimately I agree with most of what you're saying,
| including that political decisions are a large factor.
| lanstin wrote:
| I heard a podcast interview with Bill Gates recently on
| this subject, in which he identifies cement and steel as
| largely unsolved in terms of carbon impact. solar and
| electric cars is probably good enough for residential and
| transport. (Kara Swisher's Sway on 15Feb)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Price carbon at the cost needed to offset that carbon,
| use the price to offset the carbon.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Fossil free large scale steel plants are built in this
| moment:
| https://www.ssab.com/company/sustainability/sustainable-
| oper...
| jcims wrote:
| If you read that it's mostly talking about
| electrification of the steel mills and mining operations.
| It's a required step ultimately but is only as carbon
| neutral as the power coming into the facility.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Such as?
| captainredbeard wrote:
| If the government treated climate like they did COVID
| (lockdowns, etc.) it would trigger a civil war in the
| United States.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| The sad thing is that the necessary actions would impact
| people's life directly much less that the COVID
| restrictions. Petrol and flying would become expensive,
| and some jobs would disappear and be replaced with other
| jobs, sometimes somewhere else.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > some jobs would disappear
|
| Some communities would disappear. Look at Canada. Without
| trucking, air or train with low-cost energy-efficient
| fuel combustion to move goods, you have no way to supply
| the vast majority of the inland for large countries.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Yes, but that is nothing new. How many people do you need
| to run a mine today compared with 40 years ago. Or
| cutting down lumber or run a steel mill. So most
| communities far from cities are already gone.
|
| In addition, trucking et c. will not disappear. The
| moment the economic incentives are there, there will be
| hydrogen fuel cell trucks on the roads in almost a blink.
| The technology is there.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| We already heavily subsidize rural living in the US, no
| reason we couldn't just offset the emissions necessary to
| deliver goods to rural areas and encourage urbanization
| (which is not where most emissions are coming from).
| f6v wrote:
| > If they treated the climate emergency as the crisis it
| is
|
| They treat it as politicians that need to get re-elected,
| since that's linked to direct and indirect financial
| rewards. However, climate is something which is going to
| dramatically change in 50-100 years. The sea levels might
| not rise by 1 meter in the next 10-20 years. That means
| climate change isn't this government's problem. So no,
| there isn't a government on this planet that is going to
| treat climate change as an emergency.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| It's just enough that enough of their constituents do for
| them to start caring. A lot of young people and people
| with kids already care a lot. If people can worry about
| the deficit 10 or 15 years down the line people can worry
| about climate change.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > A lot of young people and people with kids already care
| a lot.
|
| A lot of young people say they want to combat climate
| change and want politicians to do so.
|
| But I've also seen the studies when those same people are
| asked about willingness to pay/sacrifice to accomplish
| that goal. They are... not good.
|
| We will see if the next generation supports a carbon tax
| if it means higher prices for consumer goods and the
| benefits disproportionately accrue to people 2
| generations down the line.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Which studies?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/who-
| is-wi...
|
| Interestingly, the younger generation is less willing to
| pay than the 30-44 age group, even though willingness to
| pay is uncorrelated with income.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Talk about cherrypicking the results. Yes, slightly more
| 30-44 year olds are willing to pay more for renewable
| energy than 18-29 year olds. But both of those groups are
| much bigger than the two groups 45-59 and 60+. So the
| reasonable conclusion is the opposite of what you
| suggest.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I guess my thinking is combatting climate change is going
| to cost more than $10/mo on the electrical bill, I pay
| like $5k/mo in tax and apparently most people in a
| similar financial situation can't accept an increase of
| like 0.5% of what they pay in taxes to avert climate
| change.
|
| $10/mo is very little, and the fact that we can barely
| get majorities of the younger generation to say that that
| would be okay is disheartening.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| >How does the COVID response have anything to do with the
| climate response?
|
| I can't speak for the parent poster, but the US COVID
| response made me pretty pessimistic about our country's
| ability to deal with complicated near-future threats that
| (a) are not immediately tangible, (b) require even modest
| personal sacrifices (see e.g., wearing masks.) Back in the
| earlier phases of the pandemic it was a near-term threat
| with an unknown IFR and a pretty high immediate body count,
| not some future concern where the worst effects are decades
| away.
|
| I guess the good news here is that some countries were much
| more successful in organizing a coordinated COVID response.
| Unfortunately, slowing down climate change is a global
| effort: you can't just seal your borders to prevent it.
| TL;DR as a practice run for how we'll deal with the much
| bigger climate crisis, our global grade in this one was
| barely passing. Thank god we had a quick technical fix in
| the form of vaccination.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Likewise. I was already somewhat pessimistic, but was
| hopeful that there might be a cultural shift with the
| younger generations.
|
| Covid made me much more pessimistic about the younger
| generation's willingness to sacrifice for greater good
| (IMO, the older generations are a lost cause).
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > How does the COVID response have anything to do with the
| climate response? The governments of the world have all
| responded differently -- some quite stringently -- and the
| speed with which we produced an mRNA vaccine (itself a
| technological marvel) is truly nuts.
|
| I read the point as that now we've seen what governments
| around the world are willing to do when they perceive a
| real emergency: Shut down entire industries, print money to
| subsidize _everybody_ , and enforce exceptions for
| rent/debt payments for people affected. There has as yet
| been no willingness to take anything of the sort in
| response to climate change.
| unix_fan wrote:
| That mostly applies to the developed world. Countries
| like mine won't be able to afford the necessary changes,
| and we're set to keep growing.
| ralusek wrote:
| If politicians, left or right, thought of climate as an
| emergency, they would behave _completely_ differently. Just
| look at the Green New Deal. If they truly thought of it as an
| emergency, they wouldn't pass highly controversial
| legislation with all sorts of policies with zero bipartisan
| support. Legislation taking climate change seriously would
| instead look like:
|
| - Carbon taxes and carbon capture incentives
|
| - Nuclear power
|
| That's not what it looks like, though.
| dantheman wrote:
| Completely agree, the green new deal isn't about climate
| change. It's a jobs program.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Is it at all possible it could be both, as perhaps the
| phrases "green" and "new deal" clearly suggest?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Ah yes, carbon taxes and nuclear power - very
| uncontroversial and bipartisan
| ralusek wrote:
| I specifically mean controversial issues being tacked
| onto the bill that are at best tangentially related.
|
| The Green New Deal literally has a stipulation within
| that guarantees "economic security to those unable or
| unwilling to work." If you thought climate change was an
| emergency, would you slip in a stipulation like this?
|
| In regards to carbon taxes, there are many Republicans
| who are fully on board with this. Mitigating negative
| third party externalities is a role for the state, even
| within libertarian think tanks.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > The Green New Deal literally has a stipulation within
| that guarantees "economic security to those unable or
| unwilling to work."
|
| Point me to that phrase in the text of the bill? Not to
| campaign slogans or Fox news hit pieces or whatever.
|
| The gap between "libertarian think tank" and Republican
| electorate is larger than it has been the last 60 years.
| There are many people in the world, so I don't doubt that
| there are "many" Republicans fully on board.
|
| Any significant chunk of the electorate though? No,
| polling doesn't indicate that.
| ralusek wrote:
| That exact text is from a draft by Ocasio Cortez. The
| finalized bill is here:
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-
| resolutio...
|
| I've included highlights of the sort below.
|
| > providing resources, training, and high-quality
| education, including higher education, to all people of
| the United States, with a focus on frontline and
| vulnerable communities, so that all people of the United
| States may be full and equal participants in the Green
| New Deal mobilization;
|
| > (E) directing investments to spur economic development,
| deepen and diversify industry and business in local and
| regional economies, and build wealth and community
| ownership, while prioritizing high-quality job creation
| and economic, social, and environmental benefits in
| frontline and vulnerable communities, and
| deindustrialized communities, that may otherwise struggle
| with the transition away from greenhouse gas intensive
| industries;
|
| > (F) ensuring the use of democratic and participatory
| processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and
| vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement,
| and administer the Green New Deal mobilization at the
| local level;
|
| > (G) ensuring that the Green New Deal mobilization
| creates high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing
| wages, hires local workers, offers training and
| advancement opportunities, and guarantees wage and
| benefit parity for workers affected by the transition;
|
| > (H) guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage,
| adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and
| retirement security to all people of the United States;
|
| > (I) strengthening and protecting the right of all
| workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain
| free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment;
|
| > (J) strengthening and enforcing labor, workplace health
| and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour
| standards across all employers, industries, and sectors;
|
| > (M) obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of
| indigenous peoples for all decisions that affect
| indigenous peoples and their traditional territories,
| honoring all treaties and agreements with indigenous
| peoples, and protecting and enforcing the sovereignty and
| land rights of indigenous peoples;
|
| > E) to promote justice and equity by stopping current,
| preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of
| indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant
| communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated
| rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women,
| the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and
| youth (referred to in this resolution as "frontline and
| vulnerable communities");
|
| > (3) to counteract systemic injustices...
|
| > (B) a large racial wealth divide amounting to a
| difference of 20 times more wealth between the average
| white family and the average black family; and
|
| > (C) a gender earnings gap that results in women earning
| approximately 80 percent as much as men, at the median;
|
| Is this the sort of legislation that you are going to try
| to get through Congress in an _emergency_? Not to mention
| the things directly related to climate, are carried out
| via overnight bans on certain technologies, and a
| commitment to rebuild 100% of all buildings in the United
| States to meet new compliance standards.
| brbsix wrote:
| The phrase _" It guarantees to everyone: Economic
| security to all who are unable or unwilling to work"_
| originated from the "What is the Green New Deal?" FAQ
| page published by AOC.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190207191119/https://ocasio
| -co...
|
| The exact text within the final resolution is: _"
| providing all people of the United States with economic
| security"_
| Supermancho wrote:
| > If they truly thought of it as an emergency,
|
| They who?
|
| > they wouldn't pass highly controversial legislation with
| all sorts of policies with zero bipartisan support
|
| The lack of bipartisan support has nothing to do with the
| emergency, aforementioned. The issue is that the US
| consumer doesn't believe it's an emergency. That's the THEY
| everyone addresses, even if someone believes their "they"
| means someone else.
|
| Once the US consumer (70% or so) is afraid of something,
| political clout follows. See the slow adoption of Marijuana
| Decriminalization and Bike Helmet Law adoption across
| states.
| hammock wrote:
| >If they truly thought of it as an emergency, they wouldn't
| pass highly controversial legislation with all sorts of
| policies with zero bipartisan support.
|
| In the spirit of "never let a good crisis go to waste," one
| might argue that emergencies are typically EXACTLY when
| politicians are most likely to pass highly controversial
| and unilateral legislation.
| throwaway888abc wrote:
| Earth Temperature Timeline for scale
|
| https://xkcd.com/1732/
| hammock wrote:
| The smoothing coefficient (or data resolution, however you
| want to look at it) on that chart is vastly different over
| different periods of time, leading to a misleading hockey
| stick type visualization.
| pixl97 wrote:
| So what you're saying is, even though it may have went high
| in the past, you believe that we have the possibility of
| dropping cool again in a short (decadal) period of time?
| hammock wrote:
| What I'm saying is, the human heartbeat looks very spiky
| when you sample it 250 times per second. When you collect
| data in minute-long periods though, it looks like a flat
| line.
|
| We do not have daily, yearly or even decadal temperature
| data for the time period 15,000 BC the way we do for the
| modern day. There is a lot of historical variability that
| is not shown on the graph. That variability could easily
| reach today's levels or higher, for moments.
| edhelas wrote:
| But Elon Musk is gonna pump all this CO2 with a new invention,
| just wait a bit.
| ben_w wrote:
| He announced that years ago, and is planning to use a century-
| old invention. It's why the Starship rockets run on methane,
| and I don't even think he's the first to suggest it specially
| for Mars rockets.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
| frongpik wrote:
| Solution? Bring millions currently remote office workers back to
| offices. Gigatons of fuel they'll have to burn on commute will
| supposedly negate the global heating.
| williesleg wrote:
| Stop breathing, that'll shut down carbon dioxide. Oh, plant a
| tree first. They eat CO2 and make O2. Easy peasy.
| NortySpock wrote:
| This is my nightmare scenario, where we literally cannot produce
| enough food for everyone.
|
| That's why I'm hopeful that artificial methods of food synthesis
| (e.g. startups like Solar Foods or Air Protein, or NASA's
| CO2->glucose prize) will be successful and allow us to begin to
| decouple food production from weather or soil fertility problems.
| rmah wrote:
| The world can and does already produce multiple times more food
| than is necessary to feed all of humanity. It's just that,
| currently, most of the crops mankind grows is used to feed
| animals which we then eat/use.
| Aunche wrote:
| This isn't a concern you have to worry about in developed
| nations at least. Food is so cheap that most of our food goes
| into feeding animals, so that we can change them into tastier
| forms of food. 30-40% of that gets thrown out anyways.
|
| Developing countries have bigger issues, but their priority
| right now is to exploit their local groundwater rather than
| pursue bleeding edge tech.
| mempko wrote:
| And yet a large portion of the US population is hungry. 20%
| of children are food insecure in the US. A change in prices
| could still disrupt a lot of people's lives. This is mostly
| because we distribute high quality food poorly to people.
|
| The US is not designed or prepared for any food supply
| disruptions. An example is during early months of COVID store
| shelves became empty for flour, sugar and other staples. It
| would take about 4 days of disruption to create a food
| shortage in the US because it's highly centralized in
| distribution and production.
| NortySpock wrote:
| 1) I still have a moral obligation to show some concern for
| my fellow human, even if they live on the far side of the
| planet. Cheaper, reliable access to food is one part of that.
|
| 2) Famine causes stability problems, unstable countries are
| more likely to turn into problematic countries and
| humanitarian crises. See: Syria
|
| 3) With globalization, a rise in food prices on the far side
| of the planet still has (eventual) price effects in other
| parts of the world, including here.
|
| 4) I don't feel comfortable washing my hands of it and saying
| market forces will take care of the problem, when it means
| the price of food will fluctuate above the grasp of the least
| fortunate. The resulting easily preventable deaths are on our
| hands if some trivial amount of subsidy or technological
| progress would have kept prices low enough for those who need
| it.
|
| 5) Same thing goes for access to water -- we should support
| access to water while making it more sustainable and cheaper.
|
| 6) I'd like to get to a post-scarcity world, not just a post-
| scarcity country.
| ben_w wrote:
| 3) is way smaller than I think you believe.
|
| It's not that it doesn't have any effect at all, but the
| raw ingredients themselves are what gets traded, and they
| are the cheapest bit for westerners -- so much so that food
| prices were noticeably different moving from the UK to
| Berlin, even though I moved before Brexit.
|
| If you're actually focused on gaming the cheapest possible
| calories and nutrients, then it makes a difference; but
| even then, the last time I ran the numbers for that the
| best I found was (rice + lentils + frozen mixed
| vegetables), and the vegetables were both the most
| expensive and also grown fairly locally.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Food is cheap until it isn't. We in "developed" America don't
| have the social or political framework to keep domestic food
| in domestic markets if need be, so it will just be an all-out
| global bidding war over American products if there is ever a
| global supply crunch.
| redisman wrote:
| What makes you say that? I thought Covid already proved
| that the US is more than capable of hoarding their own
| resources when in need. If there was famine, the political
| leadership would shut exports down immediately unless they
| want to get Bastilled.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The federal government could abrogate a contract (like an
| obligation to export a commodity) but they'd have to pay
| the same price, because of the takings clause. So food
| would not be "cheap".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Presumably in times of a global famine, that would be a
| good time to engage in heavy spending.
|
| Increasing the deficit is a much smaller problem than not
| being able to acquire enough food to ensure your
| population doesn't starve.
| [deleted]
| minitoar wrote:
| Decoupling is valuable because it lets you grow the food where
| it's needed. Food distribution is hard.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| It's always going to be more complicated than that.
|
| There's a TON of un-used ex-farmland in the US, and across the
| world, which fell out of use because prices dropped too low
| (the entire eastern part of the US used to be farms, and has
| now reforested).
|
| So if food prices rise enough, we're going to start re-farming
| marginal lands. The world is never going to "run out of food",
| probably not even enough to affect most Americans / Europeans
| notably, but will result in hunger in the third world -- but
| it's not like that's a solved problem right now.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| Maybe farmers will finally stop voting GOP and hurting their own
| interests.
| nandhinianand wrote:
| This might be out of date, but this is my usual go-to for ideas
| or chances of actions regarding climate
| change.(http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/)
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